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/sci/ - Science & Math

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File: 58 KB, 768x512, History_of_water_on_Mars.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5374815 No.5374815 [Reply] [Original]

How did planets that once had water on them lose water?

Even if the surface temperature increased, wouldn't that just make the water turn gaseous but stay on the planet? It wouldn't just drift out of the atmosphere and away from all that gravity right?

>> No.5374823

Ice caps and meteor impacts.

>> No.5374827

Jews stole it.

>> No.5374835

Solar wind carries hydrogen away from the planet if there is no magnetic field.

>> No.5374838

mars core cooled down which made it lose it's magnetic field which caused the atmosphere to be blown away by stellar wind

>> No.5374843

God stole the water from Mars so that he'd have enough to flood the earth for Noah.

>> No.5374864

Photodissociation - UV rays break apart molecules in water vapor into Hydrogen atoms and Hydroxide. The Hydrogen atoms are small enough to be carried away by the solar wind.

In the case of Earth the impact from this is small, but in the case of Venus where a runaway greenhouse effect caused almost all of whatever water may have been there to evaporate or in the case of Mars where the planet became geologically dead and its magnetic field dissipated - it's has a big effect.

>> No.5374897

>>5374864
Any figures on rate of evaporation? For instance, if we were to start with its current complete lack of a magnetosphere, and its original water content.

I want it terraformed, dammit, even if it only lasts a millennium

>> No.5374904

>>5374838
>>5374835
How long until Earth loses its field?

>> No.5374921

>>5374904

Whenever the core cools and solidifies. No time soon, the thing is still intensely hot and molten. The crust we float on doesn't go very far down at all. We'll have many other obstacles to overcome before losing our magnetic field.

>> No.5374923

>>5374921
>core cools and solidifies
Why did Mars' core and not Earths?

>> No.5374932

>>5374923
not sure there's really consensus on that, here's some related articles
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2009/04/30-02.html
http://phys.org/news141573374.html

>> No.5374934

>>5374923
Because Mars is farther from the sun

>> No.5374946

>>5374934

And much less massive.

>> No.5374953

>>5374897
There's still a LOT of water on Mars in the form of ice at the poles and below the surface. Not enough to turn the planet into a lush tropical paradise but if you could find someway of dealing with the atmosphere problem (not enough of it and not the right composition) and could increase the average temperature above freezing you could probably get it to something comparable to some of the slightly-drier temperate zones on Earth

>> No.5374954

>>5374946

This. Mars is significantly smaller than earth.

>> No.5374957

>>5374953

And even if you're not trying to make the whole planet livable, the presence of water in situ means you can set up dome cities or self-contained settlements with water and power. No need to make the whole thing inhabitable, any more than we need every hectare of land on earth to be livable. Tons of it is water, desert, mountain, etc.

Just need a place to put people, and arable land which can be accomplished with irrigation. Population density would higher of course.

>> No.5374961

Atmosphere was blown away by solar wind, the low atmospheric pressure evaporated the oceans and exposed the water to ionizing radiation thereby breaking water molecules up into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen escaped into space and the oxygen was absorbed by the planet. The remaining water fell deep into lava tubes of the cooled crust.

>> No.5374965

>>5374957
There are apparently very localized regions where there's still a weak magnetic field which would offer (some) additional protection to any settlement


Wide-scale habitation isn't possible without solving the atmosphere and temperature problems though.

>> No.5374975

>>5374965

Perhaps that's an advantage. One of the downsides to a massive atmospheric system and a living, molten core is that it occasionally produces extremely nasty disaster. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, et al.

If your water and air and power and being created not by a planetary weather system, and your protection from radiation is provided by man-made shielding instead of an organic magnetosphere, it would be a much more stable environment to live in.

>> No.5375009
File: 8 KB, 570x533, 1343400126518.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5375009

>>5374975
Natural disasters are a small price to pay for the safety and redundancy of a natural environment.
>tfw I don't have to worry about my oxygen generators malfuctioning
>or my water filtration system breaking down
>or my CO2 scrubbers not functioning
>or pressure regulator shutting down
>etc etc

>> No.5375021

>>5374961
What this guy said. But I'll add this:

The reason the solar winds didn't affect it earlier was because Mars' molten core cooled and solidified due to it being a smaller planet and it therefore lost its magnetosphere, which protects from solar winds. On Earth, the Aurora Borealis is our magnetosphere at work.

>> No.5375032

>>5375009

Fair enough. It would certainly have it's drawbacks, too.

However redundancy can overcome a lot of that. It takes something like 20,000 pumps going all the time to keep the island of Manhattan from flooding, but they've never failed all at once in fair weather. It took a violent storm to bring it all down.

I suppose a more serious concern than technical failures would be a collapse of society. If some kind of cataclysmic social upheaval wrecks complex society, you can't just abandon the cities and revert back to hunter-gatherers in the countryside. You'd just all die when all your machines stopped working.

Then again again, the threat of annihilation might have a restraining effect on how far people were willing to go in conflicts. Despite having nuclear weapons and two great big belligerent states, the possibility of annihilation DID prevent anybody from using them or starting any major direct confrontations.

>> No.5375037

Wasnt the Earth formed 4 billion years ago? So Mars formed way before Earth? Or did Mars only have water for a little while at the start of its existence?

>> No.5375041

>>5375037
About the same time. Mars lost it's water because >>5375021

>> No.5375860

New data suggests umbrella reconnection for the atmospheric evaporation on mars.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/21nov_plasmoids/

do your homework, guys.

>> No.5375875 [DELETED] 

Would be cool how sports works in Mars as the gravitational force is a third of Earth's

>> No.5375879

Would be cool to see how sports works in Mars as the gravitational force is a third of Earth's